Collective Imagination in the Era of Optimisation
December 1–4, 2025
Aalto University
Helsinki 00100
Finland
Lectures will be also streamed on M-Cult’s YouTube channel.
Speakers: artist, researcher, curator, and organiser Ruth Catlow; artist collective eeefff; artist and game designer Harold Hejazi.
Respondents: artist-organiser Andrew Gryf Paterson; PhD Marleena Huuhka, artist, educator, and co-founder of Station of Commons Grégoire Rousseau.
Food pairings for the lecturers: artists Alejandra Alarcón, Koira1 (Joona Sorsa) & Emma Vilppula and Caroline Suinner.
Art & Media Culture Agency M-Cult presents the second edition of the Minna Tarkka Lectures, an annual get-together dedicated to exploring how art, media, and technology can reshape democratic life. Titled Collective Imagination in the Era of Optimisation, M-Cult will host the Minna Tarkka Lectures 2025 in collaboration with Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and Aalto University.
Responding to pressures within contemporary social and cultural environments impacted by digital, networked, and so-called intelligent technologies, this year’s edition asks: What forms of togetherness and resistance surface through media within the context of artistic practices today? How can artists, communities, and technologies rewire shared futures when the dominant narratives emphasise acceleration and optimisation?
To explore these questions, M-Cult has invited three contemporary voices whose artistic and theoretical practices challenge technological power, while cultivating emerging forms of collectivity: Speakers include artist, researcher, curator, and organiser Ruth Catlow, artist collective eeefff, and artist and game designer Harold Hejazi. Each of them will host a lecture and a workshop.
In M-Cult’s past and present, preparing and sharing food has been a vital medium for building communities and forming infrastructures for conversation around shared tables. Continuing this celebration of relational practices, Minna Tarkka Lectures pairs each lecture with edible artworks by artists Alejandra Alarcón, Koira1 (Joona Sorsa) and Emma Vilppula, and Caroline Suinner.
Through this programme, Minna Tarkka Lectures expand into a discussion of possibilities, and calls for collective resistance, togetherness, connection, and solidarity in an era of screens, algorithms, fractured publics, and accelerationist capital. The programme tackles community organisation and technologies to participatory and performative practices, as well as gaming and collective learning.
Speakers
Ruth Catlow (United Kingdom)
Artist, researcher, curator, organiser, and co-founder of Furtherfield, a platform known for building critical digital art infrastructures and peer-to-peer practices that defend the commons.
Lecture: Life and Death in the World Wild Web
Ruth Catlow’s lecture traces how the early 1990s web’s utopian collaborations and dreams have been transformed by accelerationist capital, eroding ecologies, commons and digital freedoms. Lecture is responded to by artist-organiser Andrew Gryf Patterson.
Workshop: Finding Our Role in the World Wild Web—Solidarity Practices in Our More-than-Human Society
Harold Hejazi (Finland/Canada)
Artist and game designer who transforms play into a civic tool, reimagining museums and public spaces as arenas for participation and collective rehearsal.
Lecture: Reprogramming Public Spaces
Harold Hejazi’s playable lecture explores how collaborative games can rebuild fragmented publics and transform cultural spaces into civic arenas for shared dialogue, resistance, and togetherness in an age of digital isolation and division. Lecture is responded to by PhD Marleena Huuhka.
Workshop: Reprogramming Public Spaces through Multiplayer Gameplay
eeefff (Germany/Belarus)
An artist collective formed by artist and fiction writer Dzina Zhuk and artist and computer scientist Kolja Spesivtsev, working with the poetics and politics of new technologies.
Lecture: Scenes of Algosomatics, Educational Fiction, Partisan Technologies
Blending art, technology, and political imagination, their lecture invites reflection on collective strategies for resisting digital control and building alternative infrastructures of imagination. Lecture is responded to by artist, educator, and co-founder of Station of Commons Grégoire Rousseau.
Workshop: Algosomatic Session
Programme schedule and registration
December 1: Workshop: eeefff–Algosomatic Session
December 2: Lectures: Collective Imagination in the Era of Optimisation
December 3: Workshop: Ruth Catlow–Finding Our Role in the World Wild Web—Solidarity Practices in Our More-than-Human Society
December 4: Workshop: Harold Hejazi–Reprogramming Public Spaces through Multiplayer Gameplay
Register here.
Livestream here.
About
Inspired by the legacy of media art pioneer and M-Cult’s founder Minna Tarkka (1960–2023), this series continues her commitment to critical experimentation and socially engaged practices rooted in a deep commitment to hospitality and the intersections of political and technological development.
Minna Tarkka Lectures is produced by Art & Media Culture Agency M-Cult in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and Aalto University, Media Lab. Event is kindly supported by the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation.
